Cave art sheds new light on early mankind

Cave paintings as old as those found in Europe have been found in Indonesia, raising new questions about early mankind and the development of art in prehistoric times.

Animal drawings and hand stencils, the earliest of which has been radiocarbon-dated to almost 40,000 years ago, were discovered by a team of Australian and Indonesian archaeologists on the island of Sulawesi.

Currently the world’s oldest dated cave art is a red dot found in the El Castillo cave in Cantabria, northern Spain, which was painted 40,800 years ago, not long after modern man arrived in Europe.

The two areas are around 13,000km apart and the Indonesian findings, published in the journal Nature, raise questions about where art first arose, according to co-author Thomas Sutikna.

The University of Wollongong (UOW) PhD student, who was part of an Indonesian team that uncovered a new species of tiny human nicknamed “the Hobbit” ten years ago, said rock art was “one of the first indicators of an abstract mind — the onset of being human as we know it”.

He said: “Rock art might have emerged independently at about the same time in early modern human populations in Europe and Southeast Asia, or it might have been widely practised by the first modern humans to leave Africa tens of thousands of years earlier — if so, then animal art could have much deeper origins.”

The team found 12 hand stencils and two “figurative animal depictions” at seven limestone cave sites in the south west of Sulawesi and dated them by measuring radioactive isotopes in small stalactite-like growths called “cave popcorn” which had formed over the art.

Using this high-precision method, known as U-series dating, samples from 14 paintings at seven caves were shown to range in age from 39,9000 to 17,400 years ago. As the cave popcorn grew on top of the paintings the U-series dates only provide minimum ages for the art, which could be far older.

While cave art is found around the world, that in Europe had been thought to be the world’s oldest, with paintings dating back more than 30,000 years found at several sites.